Sun, Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition

Artist and writer Ho Rui An works at the intersection of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. His artistic practice, research and investigations are centred on images and their sites of emergence, transmission and disappearance.

Sun Sweat, Solar Queens: An Expedition (2014) is a performative lecture by Ho Rui An that uses the sun and sweat as motifs to talk about the history of colonialism by juxtaposing the historical and timeless. It takes off from an image of a statue of the Dutch anthropologist Charles Le Roux that Ho encountered in Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum. Le Roux had conducted his field work in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century and the statue depicts him at work under the tropical sun, with the back of his shirt soaked in sweat. It is from this image of colonial sweat that the artist launches into a set of investigations of what he calls the “solar unconscious,” underpinning the colonial project and its attempts at fending off the merciless tropical sun through the figure of the white lady in the tropics who is tasked with recreating within the colonies the protected sphere of the domestic.

A seminal figure of globalization according to the artist, this “solar queen” would eventually extend her maternal force the world over, cradling her subjects within an expanded imperial domestic. Spiraling out into the contemporary moment of globalisation and terrestrial meltdown, the talk finally seeks to reclaim the affective capacities of sweat as a way of getting out of ourselves and in touch with the Solar.

In the days after Ho’s live performance, the talk is presented to viewers as a video projection displayed opposite a photograph of Le Roux’s statue.